"My Margherita, this moment your letter has arrived and I reply at once. At least twenty times in the last few days I have taken my pen to write to you but have not managed it. I have a great deal to tell you. First, I have moved. I fell out with Battista Daga because I caught him kissing the elder of the landlady's girls while he still makes love to the younger one. That made me sick. Besides the place was too far from the University. Now that the heat has begun the long journey to and fro is a bore. As to Daga we made it up next day. I met him close to my new rooms and he said he was coming to look me up, though first he had said he wouldn't. I'm very comfortable here. The new landlady is a Sardinian. She says she was born at Nuoro. She's nice and kind and very pious--quite maternal in her care of me. She has given me her own room, until the departure of a very beautiful English lady whom I'm to replace. This '_Miss_' is extraordinarily like _you_. Don't be jealous though. First, because I'm violently in love with a young lady at Nuoro; secondly because '_Miss_' is going away in a few days; thirdly she's as mad as a March hare; fourth she's betrothed; fifthly I'm under the care of all the saints in heaven who are hung round the walls of my room, not to mention the blessed souls in Purgatory. They are illuminated day and night by a taper, which I know not why, seems to me itself a soul at expiation (now I'm writing what you call nonsense). "Well, I must tell you that at my new landlady's, there are two or three more foreigners, a clerk at the War Office, a Piedmontese tailor, very fashionable and refined, and a French bagman who can fire off eighty lies in eight minutes. He reminds me of your suitor, the most worshipful Signor Franziscu Carchide of Nuoro. Yesterday, for instance, while '_Miss_' and the tailor were arguing about the Boer war, Monsieur Pilbert told me, half in French half in Latin, that by force of suggestion he had made the hair come out on his baby's head and in a single hour it grew an inch, then stopped growing and at last set itself _Se développer naturellement_. Signora Obinu--that's the landlady--has a queer little old Sardinian cook, who has been thirty years in Rome and still can't speak Italian. Poor old Aunt Varvara! She was almost ravished from Sardinia, carried off by a violent _padrone_, a captain of Dragons (so she calls him) who terrified her. She's black and tiny, like a _jana_[16] keeps her native costume jealously locked up, and wears a ridiculous gown bought in the Campo dei Fiori, and a bonnet which might have belonged to the Empress Josephine. I often visit Aunt Varvara in her dark and torrid kitchen. We talk in dialect; she weeps, and asks after all the people she knew in the island. She thinks of returning to Sardinia, though she's horribly afraid of the sea and believes the storm in which she crossed to the continent is still going on. She knows nothing of the place she's living in.